After Effects News 2018 June #1

Peaking out from under the social media avalanche

The media landscape for After Effects has passed its fourth or fifth extinction. We’re well beyond just forums, magazines, VHS tapes, authoritative and not-so-much books, DVD sets, plug-in vendor stars, and steaming video supersites. Much of the older channels and venues still exist of course, but there’s a sense that some newer voices are hidden in the noise of the social media information explosion. It’s best to start at the beginning, so comparisons of methods and trend spotting may be slower coming back.

Plugin Everything, provider of plug-in scripts and templates, is launching a new Facebook Live show from Australia called “This Is Everything.” Each episode they will talk with a new and interesting artist, creative director, company owner, and beyond to crack open a door into what this creative industry looks like for them. Plugin Everything’s first “Facebook Live” episode featured Fraser Davidson, co-founder of Cub Studios in London. In addition to animation and motion design, Fraser (who also appeared on the Overtime podcast from Dribble) brings a wealth of business knowledge on opening and growing your own shop. Make sure to like Plugin Everything’s Facebook page to get the “Live Show” reminder, if you can coordinate free time with live streams from Oz.

Chris and Trish handing over the reins of MGLA to Ko Maruyama and Warren Heaton

In addition to a variety of AE-related courses, Lynda.com publishes After Effects Weekly, by E.J. Hassenfratz who shows you tips and tricks on Cinema 4D and Adobe After Effects. The stuff from Lynda.com is now almost all behind the LinkedIn paywall now, but “Lynda” is a staple of college courses and public libraries too, so you can get to content in several ways. By the way, EJ’s Cinema 4D-heavy website is Eyedesign.com.

Mikey Borup is back with After Effects Text Swapper tutorial, to show you how to swap from one text layer to another in a cool dynamic way that’s easy to rig up and create a preset.

Workbench.tv says that text animators are useful! Their latest After Effects tutorial shows you how to make an automatic cursor that will blink until your text animates on and then follow it. An earlier tutorial, Tutorial 120: One Comp to Rule Them All on how to use master properties to generate complex imagery might be fun too.

Andrew Kramer still posts tutorials occasionally. A few months ago, they posted Advanced Damage & Decay FX Tutorial! 100% After Effects!, teaching us how to “create a procedural decay system capable of generating realistic rust, moss, cracks, corrosion & more! Like most sequels, Chapter 2 is jammed packed with even more unnecessary FX!”

If you somehow missed Tank, a short film by Stu Maschwitz inspired by the old arcade game Battlezone: “Putting aside current 3D modeling techniques, Stu looked to the past and built the world of Tank entirely in Adobe After Effects, using math and code, hundreds of hours of painstaking animation work, and many years on the back burner.” See especially the free Prolost VectorKit, an After Effects CC 2018 template for 3D vector graphics animations.

The Making of Tank shares Stu’s journey; it’s required viewing for stragglers even if they never intend to replicate the effort:

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Rich Young is a long-time After Effects user from the San Francisco Bay Area. His After Effects and Premiere Pro round-ups provide viewers with an easy-to-digest summary of developments. He also supplies info and links…

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